News

Three MSI PIs are part of the creation of a new drug that extends the period of time known as the “golden hour” – the short window after a traumatic accident when medical treatment is most effective. The PIs are Professor Greg Beilman (Surgery), Professor Matthew Andrews (Duluth – Biology), and Professor Lester Drewes (Duluth – Biomedical Sciences).

The U’s Vice President for Research, Brian Herman, is stepping down at the end of December to return to a faculty position in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He has held the VP position since 2013. The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute is a core research facility in the Office of the VP for Research as part of the Research Computing umbrella group.
As he transitions, VP Herman has been featured on MinnPost and the OVPR Inquiry blog.

MSI PI Bin He (Biomedical Engineering; Director, Institute for Engineering in Medicine) reported this week they have successfully tested a robotic arm that can be controlled through brain signals. Wearing a cap with sensors, subjects were able to instruct the arm to do tasks such picking up a block. The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports (part of the Nature group of publications).

MSI PI Marlene Zuk (Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior) and Research Associate Tiffany Wolf were interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio recently about the interconnections between people, policies, and the environment. You can hear the conversation on the MPR website: Controlling parasites may not be as good as it sounds.

MSI PI Peter Reich (Regents Professor, Forest Resources; Fellow, Institute on the Environment) is among the researchers who have recently published a study showing that warming temperatures may affect the ability of soil to store carbon. This effect seems to be greatest at higher latitudes (colder regions), areas which have not received as much attention in previous research.

The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) has published a list of patents that have been awarded to University researchers during the past few months. Several MSI Principal Investigators, shown below, are on this list. The complete list can be found on the OVPR’s Inquiry blog: Patent roll call, fall 2016.
The PIs' MSI pages are linked from their names (PI names are in bold).

MSI PI Tony Low (assistant professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering) led researchers at the University of Minnesota and other institutions worldwide in a study of the optical properties of several dozen 2D materials. The study, published by the prestigious journal Nature Materials, investigates ways in which these intriguing materials might be used for faster, smaller, and more efficient electronic devices.